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As President Obama arrived for three days of meetings with other international leaders, negotiators dropped a proposal that would have committed the world to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent by midcentury and industrialized countries to slashing their emissions by 80 percent.

…. The breakdown on climate change underscored the difficulty in bridging divisions between the most developed countries like the United States and developing nations like China and India. In the end, people close to the talks said, the emerging powers refused to agree to the limits because they wanted industrial countries to commit to midterm goals in 2020 and to follow through on promises of financial and technological help in reducing emissions.

“They’re saying, ‘We just don’t trust you guys,’ ” said Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group based in the United States. “It’s the same gridlock we had last year when Bush was president.”

The basic problem isn’t the 80% reduction by 2050, which is supported by both Obama and congressional Democrats. The problem is the 2020 goal. Right now, the Waxman-Markey climate bill requires a 17% cut by 2020, but that’s from a baseline of 2005. Depending on how you crunch the numbers, that works out to a cut of only 0-4% from 1990 levels.

The Europeans, conversely, want to see a 20% cut from 1990 levels by 2020. Obama, presumably, sees no chance at all of getting Congress to agree to that, and the Europeans aren’t willing to compromise their more stringent goals. So for now, no agreement. And Copenhagen is only five months away.

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